A Note from AYANO

To everyone who supports AYANO and to all involved—thank you always.

It has been five years since we drastically shifted our musical direction and activities as AYANO.
In that time, we have produced planetarium and hall concerts, mounted our gallery-based art event for a third year, and released two albums—all through self-management. We feel we’ve been able to stay active and ambitious.
Over these five years we’ve met far more people than ever before and received tremendous encouragement, cooperation, and support. Thanks to you, we’ve been able to realize projects beyond the typical scale for an indie band. We are deeply grateful.

AYANO’s performance unit is currently seven players, but there are two core members; planning and production are handled by the two members together with Souda Uso and Yonezoh. While we’ve pursued ideas that are interesting and thought-provoking, our non-performance tasks have grown, leaving less time to make new works. Before we knew it, two years had passed without unveiling a new original song.
We often joke with musician friends that “we’re not sure if we’re a band or a company,” and while it’s natural for us to handle “company-like” work as we chose to, it became too much for the two core members to keep up. The pressure of not creating and the stress of administrative tasks weighed on us this past year.
After discussing “what next”—risky as it felt between momentum and fatigue—we agreed to pause the flow once and return to our core as artists: “an artist is defined by creating works.” We will therefore take a period to focus on creation.

On my computer I found more partly written pieces than expected.
To pour all our energy into finishing and leaving these works behind, we won’t set an end date for this period. We’re sorry to those who were looking forward to upcoming live shows, but we hope you’ll occasionally revisit our past works and keep watching over us warmly.